The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has dropped the hammer on BitTorrent-related websites and others associated with piracy and counterfeit goods—seizing domains without any prior complaints or notifications from the court.

Those navigating to the sites in question—and there are at least 70 of them—are now met with a rather imposing governmental warning screen, reminding visitors of federal copyright law. ICE says the sites were knocked down based on federal court orders, but told the New York Times that, "As this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional details available at this time." Included among the seized sites are major destinations like torrent-finder.com, and rap-centric onsmash.com, rapgodfathers.com and dajaz1.com.

The situation is a little messy because some of the torrent sites ICE has been seizing have no tracker, carry no torrents and list no copyrighted works unless someone searches for them—they're search engines, well, with a torrent slant, of course, but search engines by definition. These seizures definitely raise questions on what type of criteria the Department of Homeland Security is using and raises a dark cloud over similar, un-seized sites. Check out the full list of seized sites here. [TorrentFreak via Business Insider]